From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Sometimes it enters directly into
the composition of the events, while sometimes it relates only to their fortuitous position
among persons and places. The latter sort is splendidly exemplified by a case in the ancient
city of Providence, where in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during his
unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman. Poe generally stopped at the Mansion
House in Benefit Street—the renamed Golden Ball Inn whose roof has sheltered Washington,
Jefferson, and Lafayette—and his favourite walk led northward along the same street to
Mrs. Whitman’s home and the neighbouring hillside churchyard of St. John’s, whose
hidden expanse of eighteenth-century gravestones had for him a peculiar fascination.Now the irony is this. In this walk, so many times repeated, the world’s
greatest master of the terrible and the bizarre was obliged to pass a particular house on the
eastern side of the street; a dingy, antiquated structure perched on the abruptly rising side-hill,
with a great unkempt yard dating from a time when the region was partly open country. It does
not appear that he ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is there any evidence that he even noticed
it. And yet that house, to the two persons in possession of certain information, equals or outranks
in horror the wildest phantasy of the genius who so often passed it unknowingly, and stands
starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.The house was—and for that matter still is—of a kind to attract
the attention of the curious. Originally a farm or semi-farm building, it followed the average
New England colonial lines of the middle eighteenth century—the prosperous peaked-roof
sort, with two stories and dormerless attic, and with the Georgian doorway and interior panelling
dictated by the progress of taste at that time. It faced south, with one gable end buried to
the lower windows in the eastward rising hill, and the other exposed to the foundations toward
the street. Its construction, over a century and a half ago, had followed the grading and straightening
of the road in that especial vicinity; for Benefit Street—at first called Back Street—was
laid out as a lane winding amongst the graveyards of the first settlers, and straightened only
when the removal of the bodies to the North Burial Ground made it decently possible to cut through
the old family plots.At the start, the western wall had lain some twenty feet up a precipitous lawn
from the roadway; but a widening of the street at about the time of the Revolution sheared off
most of the intervening space, exposing the foundations so that a brick basement wall had to
be made, giving the deep cellar a street frontage with door and two windows above ground, close
to the new line of public travel. When the sidewalk was laid out a century ago the last of the
intervening space was removed; and Poe in his walks must have seen only a sheer ascent of dull
grey brick flush with the sidewalk and surmounted at a height of ten feet by the antique shingled
bulk of the house proper.The farm-like grounds extended back very deeply up the hill, almost to Wheaton
Street. The space south of the house, abutting on Benefit Street, was of course greatly above
the existing sidewalk level, forming a terrace bounded by a high bank wall of damp, mossy stone
pierced by a steep flight of narrow steps which led inward between canyon-like surfaces to the
upper region of mangy lawn, rheumy brick walls, and neglected gardens whose dismantled cement
urns, rusted kettles fallen from tripods of knotty sticks, and similar paraphernalia set off
the weather-beaten front door with its broken fanlight, rotting Ionic pilasters, and wormy triangular
pediment.What I heard in my youth about the shunned house was merely that people died
there in alarmingly great numbers. That, I was told, was why the original owners had moved out
some twenty years after building the place. It was plainly unhealthy, perhaps because of the
dampness and fungous growth in the cellar, the general sickish smell, the draughts of the hallways,
or the quality of the well and pump water. These things were bad enough, and these were all
that gained belief among the persons whom I knew. Only the notebooks of my antiquarian uncle,
Dr. Elihu Whipple, revealed to me at length the darker, vaguer surmises which formed an undercurrent
of folklore among old-time servants and humble folk; surmises which never travelled far, and
which were largely forgotten when Providence grew to be a metropolis with a shifting modern
population.The general fact is, that the house was never regarded by the solid part of
the community as in any real sense “haunted”. There were no widespread tales of
rattling chains, cold currents of air, extinguished lights, or faces at the window. Extremists
sometimes said the house was “unlucky”, but that is as far as even they went. What
was really beyond dispute is that a frightful proportion of persons died there; or more accurately,
had died there, since after some peculiar happenings over sixty years ago the building
had become deserted through the sheer impossibility of renting it. These persons were not all
cut off suddenly by any one cause; rather did it seem that their vitality was insidiously sapped,
so that each one died the sooner from whatever tendency to weakness he may have naturally had.
And those who did not die displayed in varying degree a type of anaemia or consumption, and
sometimes a decline of the mental faculties, which spoke ill for the salubriousness of the building.
Neighbouring houses, it must be added, seemed entirely free from the noxious quality.This much I knew before my insistent questioning led my uncle to shew me the
notes which finally embarked us both on our hideous investigation. In my childhood the shunned
house was vacant, with barren, gnarled, and terrible old trees, long, queerly pale grass, and
nightmarishly misshapen weeds in the high terraced yard where birds never lingered. We boys
used to overrun the place, and I can still recall my youthful terror not only at the morbid
strangeness of this sinister vegetation, but at the eldritch atmosphere and odour of the dilapidated
house, whose unlocked front door was often entered in quest of shudders. The small-paned windows
were largely broken, and a nameless air of desolation hung round the precarious panelling, shaky
interior shutters, peeling wall-paper, falling plaster, rickety staircases, and such fragments
of battered furniture as still remained. The dust and cobwebs added their touch of the fearful;
and brave indeed was the boy who would voluntarily ascend the ladder to the attic, a vast raftered
length lighted only by small blinking windows in the gable ends, and filled with a massed wreckage
of chests, chairs, and spinning-wheels which infinite years of deposit had shrouded and festooned
into monstrous and hellish shapes.But after all, the attic was not the most terrible part of the house. It was
the dank, humid cellar which somehow exerted the strongest repulsion on us, even though it was
wholly above ground on the street side, with only a thin door and window-pierced brick wall
to separate it from the busy sidewalk. We scarcely knew whether to haunt it in spectral fascination,
or to shun it for the sake of our souls and our sanity. For one thing, the bad odour of the
house was strongest there; and for another thing, we did not like the white fungous growths
which occasionally sprang up in rainy summer weather from the hard earth floor. Those fungi,
grotesquely like the vegetation in the yard outside, were truly horrible in their outlines;
detestable parodies of toadstools and Indian pipes, whose like we had never seen in any other
situation. They rotted quickly, and at one stage became slightly phosphorescent; so that nocturnal
passers-by sometimes spoke of witch-fires glowing behind the broken panes of the foetor-spreading
windows.We never—even in our wildest Hallowe’en moods—visited this
cellar by night, but in some of our daytime visits could detect the phosphorescence, especially
when the day was dark and wet. There was also a subtler thing we often thought we detected—a
very strange thing which was, however, merely suggestive at most. I refer to a sort of cloudy
whitish pattern on the dirt floor—a vague, shifting deposit of mould or nitre which we
sometimes thought we could trace amidst the sparse fungous growths near the huge fireplace of
the basement kitchen. Once in a while it struck us that this patch bore an uncanny resemblance
to a doubled-up human figure, though generally no such kinship existed, and often there was
no whitish deposit whatever. On a certain rainy afternoon when this illusion seemed phenomenally
strong, and when, in addition, I had fancied I glimpsed a kind of thin, yellowish, shimmering
exhalation rising from the nitrous pattern toward the yawning fireplace, I spoke to my uncle
about the matter. He smiled at this odd conceit, but it seemed that his smile was tinged with
reminiscence. Later I heard that a similar notion entered into some of the wild ancient tales
of the common folk—a notion likewise alluding to ghoulish, wolfish shapes taken by smoke
from the great chimney, and queer contours assumed by certain of the sinuous tree-roots that
thrust their way into the cellar through the loose foundation-stones.

II.

Not till my adult years did my uncle set before me the notes and data which he had collected
concerning the shunned house. Dr. Whipple was a sane, conservative physician of the old school,
and for all his interest in the place was not eager to encourage young thoughts toward the abnormal.
His own view, postulating simply a building and location of markedly unsanitary qualities, had
nothing to do with abnormality; but he realised that the very picturesqueness which aroused
his own interest would in a boy’s fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesome imaginative
associations.The doctor was a bachelor; a white-haired, clean-shaven, old-fashioned gentleman,
and a local historian of note, who had often broken a lance with such controversial guardians
of tradition as Sidney S. Rider and Thomas W. Bicknell. He lived with one manservant in a Georgian
homestead with knocker and iron-railed steps, balanced eerily on a steep ascent of North Court
Street beside the ancient brick court and colony house where his grandfather—a cousin
of that celebrated privateersman, Capt. Whipple, who burnt His Majesty’s armed schooner
Gaspee in 1772—had voted in the legislature on May 4, 1776, for the independence
of the Rhode Island Colony. Around him in the damp, low-ceiled library with the musty white
panelling, heavy carved overmantel, and small-paned, vine-shaded windows, were the relics and
records of his ancient family, among which were many dubious allusions to the shunned house
in Benefit Street. That pest spot lies not far distant—for Benefit runs ledgewise just
above the court-house along the precipitous hill up which the first settlement climbed.When, in the end, my insistent pestering and maturing years evoked from my
uncle the hoarded lore I sought, there lay before me a strange enough chronicle. Long-winded,
statistical, and drearily genealogical as some of the matter was, there ran through it a continuous
thread of brooding, tenacious horror and preternatural malevolence which impressed me even more
than it had impressed the good doctor. Separate events fitted together uncannily, and seemingly
irrelevant details held mines of hideous possibilities. A new and burning curiosity grew in
me, compared to which my boyish curiosity was feeble and inchoate. The first revelation led
to an exhaustive research, and finally to that shuddering quest which proved so disastrous to
myself and mine. For at last my uncle insisted on joining the search I had commenced, and after
a certain night in that house he did not come away with me. I am lonely without that gentle
soul whose long years were filled only with honour, virtue, good taste, benevolence, and learning.
I have reared a marble urn to his memory in St. John’s churchyard—the place that
Poe loved—the hidden grove of giant willows on the hill, where tombs and headstones huddle
quietly between the hoary bulk of the church and the houses and bank walls of Benefit Street.The history of the house, opening amidst a maze of dates, revealed no trace
of the sinister either about its construction or about the prosperous and honourable family
who built it. Yet from the first a taint of calamity, soon increased to boding significance,
was apparent. My uncle’s carefully compiled record began with the building of the structure
in 1763, and followed the theme with an unusual amount of detail. The shunned house, it seems,
was first inhabited by William Harris and his wife Rhoby Dexter, with their children, Elkanah,
born in 1755, Abigail, born in 1757, William, Jr., born in 1759, and Ruth, born in 1761. Harris
was a substantial merchant and seaman in the West India trade, connected with the firm of Obadiah
Brown and his nephews. After Brown’s death in 1761, the new firm of Nicholas Brown &
Co. made him master of the brig Prudence, Providence-built, of 120 tons, thus enabling
him to erect the new homestead he had desired ever since his marriage.The site he had chosen—a recently straightened part of the new and fashionable
Back Street, which ran along the side of the hill above crowded Cheapside—was all that
could be wished, and the building did justice to the location. It was the best that moderate
means could afford, and Harris hastened to move in before the birth of a fifth child which the
family expected. That child, a boy, came in December; but was still-born. Nor was any child
to be born alive in that house for a century and a half.The next April sickness occurred among the children, and Abigail and Ruth died
before the month was over. Dr. Job Ives diagnosed the trouble as some infantile fever, though
others declared it was more of a mere wasting-away or decline. It seemed, in any event, to be
contagious; for Hannah Bowen, one of the two servants, died of it in the following June. Eli
Liddeason, the other servant, constantly complained of weakness; and would have returned to
his father’s farm in Rehoboth but for a sudden attachment for Mehitabel Pierce, who was
hired to succeed Hannah. He died the next year—a sad year indeed, since it marked the
death of William Harris himself, enfeebled as he was by the climate of Martinique, where his
occupation had kept him for considerable periods during the preceding decade.The widowed Rhoby Harris never recovered from the shock of her husband’s
death, and the passing of her first-born Elkanah two years later was the final blow to her reason.
In 1768 she fell victim to a mild form of insanity, and was thereafter confined to the upper
part of the house; her elder maiden sister, Mercy Dexter, having moved in to take charge of
the family. Mercy was a plain, raw-boned woman of great strength; but her health visibly declined
from the time of her advent. She was greatly devoted to her unfortunate sister, and had an especial
affection for her only surviving nephew William, who from a sturdy infant had become a sickly,
spindling lad. In this year the servant Mehitabel died, and the other servant, Preserved Smith,
left without coherent explanation—or at least, with only some wild tales and a complaint
that he disliked the smell of the place. For a time Mercy could secure no more help, since the
seven deaths and case of madness, all occurring within five years’ space, had begun to
set in motion the body of fireside rumour which later became so bizarre. Ultimately, however,
she obtained new servants from out of town; Ann White, a morose woman from that part of North
Kingstown now set off as the township of Exeter, and a capable Boston man named Zenas Low.It was Ann White who first gave definite shape to the sinister idle talk. Mercy
should have known better than to hire anyone from the Nooseneck Hill country, for that remote
bit of backwoods was then, as now, a seat of the most uncomfortable superstitions. As lately
as 1892 an Exeter community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its heart in order to
prevent certain alleged visitations injurious to the public health and peace, and one may imagine
the point of view of the same section in 1768. Ann’s tongue was perniciously active, and
within a few months Mercy discharged her, filling her place with a faithful and amiable Amazon
from Newport, Maria Robbins.Meanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her madness, gave voice to dreams and imaginings
of the most hideous sort. At times her screams became insupportable, and for long periods she
would utter shrieking horrors which necessitated her son’s temporary residence with his
cousin, Peleg Harris, in Presbyterian-Lane near the new college building. The boy would seem
to improve after these visits, and had Mercy been as wise as she was well-meaning, she would
have let him live permanently with Peleg. Just what Mrs. Harris cried out in her fits of violence,
tradition hesitates to say; or rather, presents such extravagant accounts that they nullify
themselves through sheer absurdity. Certainly it sounds absurd to hear that a woman educated
only in the rudiments of French often shouted for hours in a coarse and idiomatic form of that
language, or that the same person, alone and guarded, complained wildly of a staring thing which
bit and chewed at her. In 1772 the servant Zenas died, and when Mrs. Harris heard of it she
laughed with a shocking delight utterly foreign to her. The next year she herself died, and
was laid to rest in the North Burial Ground beside her husband.Upon the outbreak of trouble with Great Britain in 1775, William Harris, despite
his scant sixteen years and feeble constitution, managed to enlist in the Army of Observation
under General Greene; and from that time on enjoyed a steady rise in health and prestige. In
1780, as a Captain in Rhode Island forces in New Jersey under Colonel Angell, he met and married
Phebe Hetfield of Elizabethtown, whom he brought to Providence upon his honourable discharge
in the following year.The young soldier’s return was not a thing of unmitigated happiness.
The house, it is true, was still in good condition; and the street had been widened and changed
in name from Back Street to Benefit Street. But Mercy Dexter’s once robust frame had undergone
a sad and curious decay, so that she was now a stooped and pathetic figure with hollow voice
and disconcerting pallor—qualities shared to a singular degree by the one remaining servant
Maria. In the autumn of 1782 Phebe Harris gave birth to a still-born daughter, and on the fifteenth
of the next May Mercy Dexter took leave of a useful, austere, and virtuous life.William Harris, at last thoroughly convinced of the radically unhealthful nature
of his abode, now took steps toward quitting it and closing it forever. Securing temporary quarters
for himself and his wife at the newly opened Golden Ball Inn, he arranged for the building of
a new and finer house in Westminster Street, in the growing part of the town across the Great
Bridge. There, in 1785, his son Dutee was born; and there the family dwelt till the encroachments
of commerce drove them back across the river and over the hill to Angell Street, in the newer
East Side residence district, where the late Archer Harris built his sumptuous but hideous French-roofed
mansion in 1876. William and Phebe both succumbed to the yellow fever epidemic of 1797, but
Dutee was brought up by his cousin Rathbone Harris, Peleg’s son.Rathbone was a practical man, and rented the Benefit Street house despite William’s
wish to keep it vacant. He considered it an obligation to his ward to make the most of all the
boy’s property, nor did he concern himself with the deaths and illnesses which caused
so many changes of tenants, or the steadily growing aversion with which the house was generally
regarded. It is likely that he felt only vexation when, in 1804, the town council ordered him
to fumigate the place with sulphur, tar, and gum camphor on account of the much-discussed deaths
of four persons, presumably caused by the then diminishing fever epidemic. They said the place
had a febrile smell.Dutee himself thought little of the house, for he grew up to be a privateersman,
and served with distinction on the Vigilant under Capt. Cahoone in the War of 1812. He
returned unharmed, married in 1814, and became a father on that memorable night of September
23, 1815, when a great gale drove the waters of the bay over half the town, and floated a tall
sloop well up Westminster Street so that its masts almost tapped the Harris windows in symbolic
affirmation that the new boy, Welcome, was a seaman’s son.Welcome did not survive his father, but lived to perish gloriously at Fredericksburg
in 1862. Neither he nor his son Archer knew of the shunned house as other than a nuisance almost
impossible to rent—perhaps on account of the mustiness and sickly odour of unkempt old
age. Indeed, it never was rented after a series of deaths culminating in 1861, which the excitement
of the war tended to throw into obscurity. Carrington Harris, last of the male line, knew it
only as a deserted and somewhat picturesque centre of legend until I told him my experience.
He had meant to tear it down and build an apartment house on the site, but after my account
decided to let it stand, install plumbing, and rent it. Nor has he yet had any difficulty in
obtaining tenants. The horror has gone.

III.

It may well be imagined how powerfully I was affected by the annals of the Harrises. In this
continuous record there seemed to me to brood a persistent evil beyond anything in Nature as
I had known it; an evil clearly connected with the house and not with the family. This impression
was confirmed by my uncle’s less systematic array of miscellaneous data—legends
transcribed from servant gossip, cuttings from the papers, copies of death-certificates by fellow-physicians,
and the like. All of this material I cannot hope to give, for my uncle was a tireless antiquarian
and very deeply interested in the shunned house; but I may refer to several dominant points
which earn notice by their recurrence through many reports from diverse sources. For example,
the servant gossip was practically unanimous in attributing to the fungous and malodorous
cellar of the house a vast supremacy in evil influence. There had been servants—Ann
White especially—who would not use the cellar kitchen, and at least three well-defined
legends bore upon the queer quasi-human or diabolic outlines assumed by tree-roots and patches
of mould in that region. These latter narratives interested me profoundly, on account of what
I had seen in my boyhood, but I felt that most of the significance had in each case been largely
obscured by additions from the common stock of local ghost lore.Ann White, with her Exeter superstition, had promulgated the most extravagant
and at the same time most consistent tale; alleging that there must lie buried beneath the house
one of those vampires—the dead who retain their bodily form and live on the blood or breath
of the living—whose hideous legions send their preying shapes or spirits abroad by night.
To destroy a vampire one must, the grandmothers say, exhume it and burn its heart, or at least
drive a stake through that organ; and Ann’s dogged insistence on a search under the cellar
had been prominent in bringing about her discharge.Her tales, however, commanded a wide audience, and were the more readily accepted
because the house indeed stood on land once used for burial purposes. To me their interest depended
less on this circumstance than on the peculiarly appropriate way in which they dovetailed with
certain other things—the complaint of the departing servant Preserved Smith, who had preceded
Ann and never heard of her, that something “sucked his breath” at night; the death-certificates
of fever victims of 1804, issued by Dr. Chad Hopkins, and shewing the four deceased persons
all unaccountably lacking in blood; and the obscure passages of poor Rhoby Harris’s ravings,
where she complained of the sharp teeth of a glassy-eyed, half-visible presence.Free from unwarranted superstition though I am, these things produced in me
an odd sensation, which was intensified by a pair of widely separated newspaper cuttings relating
to deaths in the shunned house—one from the Providence Gazette and Country-Journal
of April 12, 1815, and the other from the Daily Transcript and Chronicle of October 27,
1845—each of which detailed an appallingly grisly circumstance whose duplication was remarkable.
It seems that in both instances the dying person, in 1815 a gentle old lady named Stafford and
in 1845 a school-teacher of middle age named Eleazar Durfee, became transfigured in a horrible
way; glaring glassily and attempting to bite the throat of the attending physician. Even more
puzzling, though, was the final case which put an end to the renting of the house—a series
of anaemia deaths preceded by progressive madnesses wherein the patient would craftily attempt
the lives of his relatives by incisions in the neck or wrist.This was in 1860 and 1861, when my uncle had just begun his medical practice;
and before leaving for the front he heard much of it from his elder professional colleagues.
The really inexplicable thing was the way in which the victims—ignorant people, for the
ill-smelling and widely shunned house could now be rented to no others—would babble maledictions
in French, a language they could not possibly have studied to any extent. It made one think
of poor Rhoby Harris nearly a century before, and so moved my uncle that he commenced collecting
historical data on the house after listening, some time subsequent to his return from the war,
to the first-hand account of Drs. Chase and Whitmarsh. Indeed, I could see that my uncle had
thought deeply on the subject, and that he was glad of my own interest—an open-minded
and sympathetic interest which enabled him to discuss with me matters at which others would
merely have laughed. His fancy had not gone so far as mine, but he felt that the place was rare
in its imaginative potentialities, and worthy of note as an inspiration in the field of the
grotesque and macabre.For my part, I was disposed to take the whole subject with profound seriousness,
and began at once not only to review the evidence, but to accumulate as much more as I could.
I talked with the elderly Archer Harris, then owner of the house, many times before his death
in 1916; and obtained from him and his still surviving maiden sister Alice an authentic corroboration
of all the family data my uncle had collected. When, however, I asked them what connexion with
France or its language the house could have, they confessed themselves as frankly baffled and
ignorant as I. Archer knew nothing, and all that Miss Harris could say was that an old allusion
her grandfather, Dutee Harris, had heard of might have shed a little light. The old seaman,
who had survived his son Welcome’s death in battle by two years, had not himself known
the legend; but recalled that his earliest nurse, the ancient Maria Robbins, seemed darkly aware
of something that might have lent a weird significance to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris,
which she had so often heard during the last days of that hapless woman. Maria had been at the
shunned house from 1769 till the removal of the family in 1783, and had seen Mercy Dexter die.
Once she hinted to the child Dutee of a somewhat peculiar circumstance in Mercy’s last
moments, but he had soon forgotten all about it save that it was something peculiar. The granddaughter,
moreover, recalled even this much with difficulty. She and her brother were not so much interested
in the house as was Archer’s son Carrington, the present owner, with whom I talked after
my experience.Having exhausted the Harris family of all the information it could furnish,
I turned my attention to early town records and deeds with a zeal more penetrating than that
which my uncle had occasionally shewn in the same work. What I wished was a comprehensive history
of the site from its very settlement in 1636—or even before, if any Narragansett Indian
legend could be unearthed to supply the data. I found, at the start, that the land had been
part of the long strip of home lot granted originally to John Throckmorton; one of many similar
strips beginning at the Town Street beside the river and extending up over the hill to a line
roughly corresponding with the modern Hope Street. The Throckmorton lot had later, of course,
been much subdivided; and I became very assiduous in tracing that section through which Back
or Benefit Street was later run. It had, a rumour indeed said, been the Throckmorton graveyard;
but as I examined the records more carefully, I found that the graves had all been transferred
at an early date to the North Burial Ground on the Pawtucket West Road.Then suddenly I came—by a rare piece of chance, since it was not in the
main body of records and might easily have been missed—upon something which aroused my
keenest eagerness, fitting in as it did with several of the queerest phases of the affair. It
was the record of a lease, in 1697, of a small tract of ground to an Etienne Roulet and wife.
At last the French element had appeared—that, and another deeper element of horror which
the name conjured up from the darkest recesses of my weird and heterogeneous reading—and
I feverishly studied the platting of the locality as it had been before the cutting through
and partial straightening of Back Street between 1747 and 1758. I found what I had half expected,
that where the shunned house now stood the Roulets had laid out their graveyard behind a one-story
and attic cottage, and that no record of any transfer of graves existed. The document, indeed,
ended in much confusion; and I was forced to ransack both the Rhode Island Historical Society
and Shepley Library before I could find a local door which the name Etienne Roulet would unlock.
In the end I did find something; something of such vague but monstrous import that I set about
at once to examine the cellar of the shunned house itself with a new and excited minuteness.The Roulets, it seemed, had come in 1696 from East Greenwich, down the west
shore of Narragansett Bay. They were Huguenots from Caude, and had encountered much opposition
before the Providence selectmen allowed them to settle in the town. Unpopularity had dogged
them in East Greenwich, whither they had come in 1686, after the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes, and rumour said that the cause of dislike extended beyond mere racial and national prejudice,
or the land disputes which involved other French settlers with the English in rivalries which
not even Governor Andros could quell. But their ardent Protestantism—too ardent, some
whispered—and their evident distress when virtually driven from the village down the bay,
had moved the sympathy of the town fathers. Here the strangers had been granted a haven; and
the swarthy Etienne Roulet, less apt at agriculture than at reading queer books and drawing
queer diagrams, was given a clerical post in the warehouse at Pardon Tillinghast’s wharf,
far south in Town Street. There had, however, been a riot of some sort later on—perhaps
forty years later, after old Roulet’s death—and no one seemed to hear of the family
after that.For a century and more, it appeared, the Roulets had been well remembered and
frequently discussed as vivid incidents in the quiet life of a New England seaport. Etienne’s
son Paul, a surly fellow whose erratic conduct had probably provoked the riot which wiped out
the family, was particularly a source of speculation; and though Providence never shared the
witchcraft panics of her Puritan neighbours, it was freely intimated by old wives that his prayers
were neither uttered at the proper time nor directed toward the proper object. All this had
undoubtedly formed the basis of the legend known by old Maria Robbins. What relation it had
to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris and other inhabitants of the shunned house, imagination
or future discovery alone could determine. I wondered how many of those who had known the legends
realised that additional link with the terrible which my wide reading had given me; that ominous
item in the annals of morbid horror which tells of the creature Jacques Roulet, of Caude,
who in 1598 was condemned to death as a daemoniac but afterward saved from the stake by the
Paris parliament and shut in a madhouse. He had been found covered with blood and shreds of
flesh in a wood, shortly after the killing and rending of a boy by a pair of wolves. One wolf
was seen to lope away unhurt. Surely a pretty hearthside tale, with a queer significance as
to name and place; but I decided that the Providence gossips could not have generally known
of it. Had they known, the coincidence of names would have brought some drastic and frightened
action—indeed, might not its limited whispering have precipitated the final riot which
erased the Roulets from the town?I now visited the accursed place with increased frequency; studying the unwholesome
vegetation of the garden, examining all the walls of the building, and poring over every inch
of the earthen cellar floor. Finally, with Carrington Harris’s permission, I fitted a
key to the disused door opening from the cellar directly upon Benefit Street, preferring to
have a more immediate access to the outside world than the dark stairs, ground floor hall, and
front door could give. There, where morbidity lurked most thickly, I searched and poked during
long afternoons when the sunlight filtered in through the cobwebbed above-ground windows, and
a sense of security glowed from the unlocked door which placed me only a few feet from the placid
sidewalk outside. Nothing new rewarded my efforts—only the same depressing mustiness and
faint suggestions of noxious odours and nitrous outlines on the floor—and I fancy that
many pedestrians must have watched me curiously through the broken panes.At length, upon a suggestion of my uncle’s, I decided to try the spot
nocturnally; and one stormy midnight ran the beams of an electric torch over the mouldy floor
with its uncanny shapes and distorted, half-phosphorescent fungi. The place had dispirited me
curiously that evening, and I was almost prepared when I saw—or thought I saw—amidst
the whitish deposits a particularly sharp definition of the “huddled form” I had
suspected from boyhood. Its clearness was astonishing and unprecedented—and as I watched
I seemed to see again the thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation which had startled me on that
rainy afternoon so many years before.Above the anthropomorphic patch of mould by the fireplace it rose; a subtle,
sickish, almost luminous vapour which as it hung trembling in the dampness seemed to develop
vague and shocking suggestions of form, gradually trailing off into nebulous decay and passing
up into the blackness of the great chimney with a foetor in its wake. It was truly horrible,
and the more so to me because of what I knew of the spot. Refusing to flee, I watched it fade—and
as I watched I felt that it was in turn watching me greedily with eyes more imaginable than
visible. When I told my uncle about it he was greatly aroused; and after a tense hour of reflection,
arrived at a definite and drastic decision. Weighing in his mind the importance of the matter,
and the significance of our relation to it, he insisted that we both test—and if possible
destroy—the horror of the house by a joint night or nights of aggressive vigil in that
musty and fungus-cursed cellar.

IV.

On Wednesday, June 25, 1919, after a proper notification of Carrington Harris which did not
include surmises as to what we expected to find, my uncle and I conveyed to the shunned house
two camp chairs and a folding camp cot, together with some scientific mechanism of greater weight
and intricacy. These we placed in the cellar during the day, screening the windows with paper
and planning to return in the evening for our first vigil. We had locked the door from the cellar
to the ground floor; and having a key to the outside cellar door, we were prepared to leave
our expensive and delicate apparatus—which we had obtained secretly and at great cost—as
many days as our vigils might need to be protracted. It was our design to sit up together till
very late, and then watch singly till dawn in two-hour stretches, myself first and then my companion;
the inactive member resting on the cot.The natural leadership with which my uncle procured the instruments from the
laboratories of Brown University and the Cranston Street Armoury, and instinctively assumed
direction of our venture, was a marvellous commentary on the potential vitality and resilience
of a man of eighty-one. Elihu Whipple had lived according to the hygienic laws he had preached
as a physician, and but for what happened later would be here in full vigour today. Only two
persons suspect what did happen—Carrington Harris and myself. I had to tell Harris because
he owned the house and deserved to know what had gone out of it. Then too, we had spoken to
him in advance of our quest; and I felt after my uncle’s going that he would understand
and assist me in some vitally necessary public explanations. He turned very pale, but agreed
to help me, and decided that it would now be safe to rent the house.To declare that we were not nervous on that rainy night of watching would be
an exaggeration both gross and ridiculous. We were not, as I have said, in any sense childishly
superstitious, but scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe of
three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy. In
this case an overwhelming preponderance of evidence from numerous authentic sources pointed
to the tenacious existence of certain forces of great power and, so far as the human point of
view is concerned, exceptional malignancy. To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves
would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared
to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force
and attenuated matter; existing very infrequently in three-dimensional space because of its
more intimate connexion with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own
to furnish us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may never
hope to understand.In short, it seemed to my uncle and me that an incontrovertible array of facts
pointed to some lingering influence in the shunned house; traceable to one or another of the
ill-favoured French settlers of two centuries before, and still operative through rare and unknown
laws of atomic and electronic motion. That the family of Roulet had possessed an abnormal affinity
for outer circles of entity—dark spheres which for normal folk hold only repulsion and
terror—their recorded history seemed to prove. Had not, then, the riots of those bygone
seventeen-thirties set moving certain kinetic patterns in the morbid brain of one or more of
them—notably the sinister Paul Roulet—which obscurely survived the bodies murdered
and buried by the mob, and continued to function in some multiple-dimensioned space along the
original lines of force determined by a frantic hatred of the encroaching community?Such a thing was surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in the
light of a newer science which includes the theories of relativity and intra-atomic action.
One might easily imagine an alien nucleus of substance or energy, formless or otherwise, kept
alive by imperceptible or immaterial subtractions from the life-force or bodily tissues and
fluids of other and more palpably living things into which it penetrates and with whose fabric
it sometimes completely merges itself. It might be actively hostile, or it might be dictated
merely by blind motives of self-preservation. In any case such a monster must of necessity be
in our scheme of things an anomaly and an intruder, whose extirpation forms a primary duty with
every man not an enemy to the world’s life, health, and sanity.What baffled us was our utter ignorance of the aspect in which we might encounter
the thing. No sane person had even seen it, and few had ever felt it definitely. It might be
pure energy—a form ethereal and outside the realm of substance—or it might be partly
material; some unknown and equivocal mass of plasticity, capable of changing at will to nebulous
approximations of the solid, liquid, gaseous, or tenuously unparticled states. The anthropomorphic
patch of mould on the floor, the form of the yellowish vapour, and the curvature of the tree-roots
in some of the old tales, all argued at least a remote and reminiscent connexion with the human
shape; but how representative or permanent that similarity might be, none could say with any
kind of certainty.We had devised two weapons to fight it; a large and specially fitted Crookes
tube operated by powerful storage batteries and provided with peculiar screens and reflectors,
in case it proved intangible and opposable only by vigorously destructive ether radiations,
and a pair of military flame-throwers of the sort used in the world-war, in case it proved partly
material and susceptible of mechanical destruction—for like the superstitious Exeter rustics,
we were prepared to burn the thing’s heart out if heart existed to burn. All this aggressive
mechanism we set in the cellar in positions carefully arranged with reference to the cot and
chairs, and to the spot before the fireplace where the mould had taken strange shapes. That
suggestive patch, by the way, was only faintly visible when we placed our furniture and instruments,
and when we returned that evening for the actual vigil. For a moment I half doubted that I had
ever seen it in the more definitely limned form—but then I thought of the legends.Our cellar vigil began at 10 p.m., daylight saving time, and as it continued
we found no promise of pertinent developments. A weak, filtered glow from the rain-harassed
street-lamps outside, and a feeble phosphorescence from the detestable fungi within, shewed
the dripping stone of the walls, from which all traces of whitewash had vanished; the dank,
foetid, and mildew-tainted hard earth floor with its obscene fungi; the rotting remains of what
had been stools, chairs, and tables, and other more shapeless furniture; the heavy planks and
massive beams of the ground floor overhead; the decrepit plank door leading to bins and chambers
beneath other parts of the house; the crumbling stone staircase with ruined wooden hand-rail;
and the crude and cavernous fireplace of blackened brick where rusted iron fragments revealed
the past presence of hooks, andirons, spit, crane, and a door to the Dutch oven—these
things, and our austere cot and camp chairs, and the heavy and intricate destructive machinery
we had brought.We had, as in my own former explorations, left the door to the street unlocked;
so that a direct and practical path of escape might lie open in case of manifestations beyond
our power to deal with. It was our idea that our continued nocturnal presence would call forth
whatever malign entity lurked there; and that being prepared, we could dispose of the thing
with one or the other of our provided means as soon as we had recognised and observed it sufficiently.
How long it might require to evoke and extinguish the thing, we had no notion. It occurred to
us, too, that our venture was far from safe; for in what strength the thing might appear no
one could tell. But we deemed the game worth the hazard, and embarked on it alone and unhesitatingly;
conscious that the seeking of outside aid would only expose us to ridicule and perhaps defeat
our entire purpose. Such was our frame of mind as we talked—far into the night, till my
uncle’s growing drowsiness made me remind him to lie down for his two-hour sleep.Something like fear chilled me as I sat there in the small hours alone—I
say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise.
My uncle breathed heavily, his deep inhalations and exhalations accompanied by the rain outside,
and punctuated by another nerve-racking sound of distant dripping water within—for the
house was repulsively damp even in dry weather, and in this storm positively swamp-like. I studied
the loose, antique masonry of the walls in the fungus-light and the feeble rays which stole
in from the street through the screened windows; and once, when the noisome atmosphere of the
place seemed about to sicken me, I opened the door and looked up and down the street, feasting
my eyes on familiar sights and my nostrils on the wholesome air. Still nothing occurred to reward
my watching; and I yawned repeatedly, fatigue getting the better of apprehension.Then the stirring of my uncle in his sleep attracted my notice. He had turned
restlessly on the cot several times during the latter half of the first hour, but now he was
breathing with unusual irregularity, occasionally heaving a sigh which held more than a few
of the qualities of a choking moan. I turned my electric flashlight on him and found his face
averted, so rising and crossing to the other side of the cot, I again flashed the light to see
if he seemed in any pain. What I saw unnerved me most surprisingly, considering its relative
triviality. It must have been merely the association of any odd circumstance with the sinister
nature of our location and mission, for surely the circumstance was not in itself frightful
or unnatural. It was merely that my uncle’s facial expression, disturbed no doubt by the
strange dreams which our situation prompted, betrayed considerable agitation, and seemed not
at all characteristic of him. His habitual expression was one of kindly and well-bred calm,
whereas now a variety of emotions seemed struggling within him. I think, on the whole, that
it was this variety which chiefly disturbed me. My uncle, as he gasped and tossed in
increasing perturbation and with eyes that had now started open, seemed not one but many men,
and suggested a curious quality of alienage from himself.All at once he commenced to mutter, and I did not like the look of his mouth
and teeth as he spoke. The words were at first indistinguishable, and then—with a tremendous
start—I recognised something about them which filled me with icy fear till I recalled
the breadth of my uncle’s education and the interminable translations he had made from
anthropological and antiquarian articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes. For the venerable
Elihu Whipple was muttering in French, and the few phrases I could distinguish seemed
connected with the darkest myths he had ever adapted from the famous Paris magazine.Suddenly a perspiration broke out on the sleeper’s forehead, and he leaped
abruptly up, half awake. The jumble of French changed to a cry in English, and the hoarse voice
shouted excitedly, “My breath, my breath!” Then the awakening became complete, and
with a subsidence of facial expression to the normal state my uncle seized my hand and began
to relate a dream whose nucleus of significance I could only surmise with a kind of awe.He had, he said, floated off from a very ordinary series of dream-pictures
into a scene whose strangeness was related to nothing he had ever read. It was of this world,
and yet not of it—a shadowy geometrical confusion in which could be seen elements of familiar
things in most unfamiliar and perturbing combinations. There was a suggestion of queerly disordered
pictures superimposed one upon another; an arrangement in which the essentials of time as well
as of space seemed dissolved and mixed in the most illogical fashion. In this kaleidoscopic
vortex of phantasmal images were occasional snapshots, if one might use the term, of singular
clearness but unaccountable heterogeneity.Once my uncle thought he lay in a carelessly dug open pit, with a crowd of
angry faces framed by straggling locks and three-cornered hats frowning down on him. Again he
seemed to be in the interior of a house—an old house, apparently—but the details
and inhabitants were constantly changing, and he could never be certain of the faces or the
furniture, or even of the room itself, since doors and windows seemed in just as great a state
of flux as the more presumably mobile objects. It was queer—damnably queer—and my
uncle spoke almost sheepishly, as if half expecting not to be believed, when he declared that
of the strange faces many had unmistakably borne the features of the Harris family. And all
the while there was a personal sensation of choking, as if some pervasive presence had spread
itself through his body and sought to possess itself of his vital processes. I shuddered at
the thought of those vital processes, worn as they were by eighty-one years of continuous functioning,
in conflict with unknown forces of which the youngest and strongest system might well be afraid;
but in another moment reflected that dreams are only dreams, and that these uncomfortable visions
could be, at most, no more than my uncle’s reaction to the investigations and expectations
which had lately filled our minds to the exclusion of all else.Conversation, also, soon tended to dispel my sense of strangeness; and in time
I yielded to my yawns and took my turn at slumber. My uncle seemed now very wakeful, and welcomed
his period of watching even though the nightmare had aroused him far ahead of his allotted two
hours. Sleep seized me quickly, and I was at once haunted with dreams of the most disturbing
kind. I felt, in my visions, a cosmic and abysmal loneness; with hostility surging from all
sides upon some prison where I lay confined. I seemed bound and gagged, and taunted by the echoing
yells of distant multitudes who thirsted for my blood. My uncle’s face came to me with
less pleasant associations than in waking hours, and I recall many futile struggles and attempts
to scream. It was not a pleasant sleep, and for a second I was not sorry for the echoing shriek
which clove through the barriers of dream and flung me to a sharp and startled awakeness in
which every actual object before my eyes stood out with more than natural clearness and reality.

V.

I had been lying with my face away from my uncle’s chair, so that in this sudden flash
of awakening I saw only the door to the street, the more northerly window, and the wall and
floor and ceiling toward the north of the room, all photographed with morbid vividness on my
brain in a light brighter than the glow of the fungi or the rays from the street outside. It
was not a strong or even a fairly strong light; certainly not nearly strong enough to read an
average book by. But it cast a shadow of myself and the cot on the floor, and had a yellowish,
penetrating force that hinted at things more potent than luminosity. This I perceived with unhealthy
sharpness despite the fact that two of my other senses were violently assailed. For on my ears
rang the reverberations of that shocking scream, while my nostrils revolted at the stench which
filled the place. My mind, as alert as my senses, recognised the gravely unusual; and almost
automatically I leaped up and turned about to grasp the destructive instruments which we had
left trained on the mouldy spot before the fireplace. As I turned, I dreaded what I was to see;
for the scream had been in my uncle’s voice, and I knew not against what menace I should
have to defend him and myself.Yet after all, the sight was worse than I had dreaded. There are horrors beyond
horrors, and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamable hideousness which the cosmos saves
to blast an accursed and unhappy few. Out of the fungus-ridden earth steamed up a vaporous corpse-light,
yellow and diseased, which bubbled and lapped to a gigantic height in vague outlines half-human
and half-monstrous, through which I could see the chimney and fireplace beyond. It was all eyes—wolfish
and mocking—and the rugose insect-like head dissolved at the top to a thin stream of mist
which curled putridly about and finally vanished up the chimney. I say that I saw this thing,
but it is only in conscious retrospection that I ever definitely traced its damnable approach
to form. At the time it was to me only a seething, dimly phosphorescent cloud of fungous loathsomeness,
enveloping and dissolving to an abhorrent plasticity the one object to which all my attention
was focussed. That object was my uncle—the venerable Elihu Whipple—who with blackening
and decaying features leered and gibbered at me, and reached out dripping claws to rend me in
the fury which this horror had brought.It was a sense of routine which kept me from going mad. I had drilled myself
in preparation for the crucial moment, and blind training saved me. Recognising the bubbling
evil as no substance reachable by matter or material chemistry, and therefore ignoring the flame-thrower
which loomed on my left, I threw on the current of the Crookes tube apparatus, and focussed
toward that scene of immortal blasphemousness the strongest ether radiations which man’s
art can arouse from the spaces and fluids of Nature. There was a bluish haze and a frenzied
sputtering, and the yellowish phosphorescence grew dimmer to my eyes. But I saw the dimness
was only that of contrast, and that the waves from the machine had no effect whatever.Then, in the midst of that daemoniac spectacle, I saw a fresh horror which
brought cries to my lips and sent me fumbling and staggering toward that unlocked door to the
quiet street, careless of what abnormal terrors I loosed upon the world, or what thoughts or
judgments of men I brought down upon my head. In that dim blend of blue and yellow the form
of my uncle had commenced a nauseous liquefaction whose essence eludes all description, and
in which there played across his vanishing face such changes of identity as only madness can
conceive. He was at once a devil and a multitude, a charnel-house and a pageant. Lit by the
mixed and uncertain beams, that gelatinous face assumed a dozen—a score—a hundred—aspects;
grinning, as it sank to the ground on a body that melted like tallow, in the caricatured likeness
of legions strange and yet not strange.I saw the features of the Harris line, masculine and feminine, adult and infantile,
and other features old and young, coarse and refined, familiar and unfamiliar. For a second
there flashed a degraded counterfeit of a miniature of poor mad Rhoby Harris that I had seen
in the School of Design Museum, and another time I thought I caught the raw-boned image of Mercy
Dexter as I recalled her from a painting in Carrington Harris’s house. It was frightful
beyond conception; toward the last, when a curious blend of servant and baby visages flickered
close to the fungous floor where a pool of greenish grease was spreading, it seemed as though
the shifting features fought against themselves, and strove to form contours like those of my
uncle’s kindly face. I like to think that he existed at that moment, and that he tried
to bid me farewell. It seems to me I hiccoughed a farewell from my own parched throat as I lurched
out into the street; a thin stream of grease following me through the door to the rain-drenched
sidewalk.The rest is shadowy and monstrous. There was no one in the soaking street,
and in all the world there was no one I dared tell. I walked aimlessly south past College Hill
and the Athenaeum, down Hopkins Street, and over the bridge to the business section where tall
buildings seemed to guard me as modern material things guard the world from ancient and unwholesome
wonder. Then grey dawn unfolded wetly from the east, silhouetting the archaic hill and its venerable
steeples, and beckoning me to the place where my terrible work was still unfinished. And in
the end I went, wet, hatless, and dazed in the morning light, and entered that awful door in
Benefit Street which I had left ajar, and which still swung cryptically in full sight of the
early householders to whom I dared not speak.The grease was gone, for the mouldy floor was porous. And in front of the fireplace
was no vestige of the giant doubled-up form in nitre. I looked at the cot, the chairs, the instruments,
my neglected hat, and the yellowed straw hat of my uncle. Dazedness was uppermost, and I could
scarcely recall what was dream and what was reality. Then thought trickled back, and I knew
that I had witnessed things more horrible than I had dreamed. Sitting down, I tried to conjecture
as nearly as sanity would let me just what had happened, and how I might end the horror, if
indeed it had been real. Matter it seemed not to be, nor ether, nor anything else conceivable
by mortal mind. What, then, but some exotic emanation; some vampirish vapour such as
Exeter rustics tell of as lurking over certain churchyards? This I felt was the clue, and again
I looked at the floor before the fireplace where the mould and nitre had taken strange forms.
In ten minutes my mind was made up, and taking my hat I set out for home, where I bathed, ate,
and gave by telephone an order for a pickaxe, a spade, a military gas-mask, and six carboys
of sulphuric acid, all to be delivered the next morning at the cellar door of the shunned house
in Benefit Street. After that I tried to sleep; and failing, passed the hours in reading and
in the composition of inane verses to counteract my mood.At 11 a.m. the next day I commenced digging. It was sunny weather, and I was
glad of that. I was still alone, for as much as I feared the unknown horror I sought, there
was more fear in the thought of telling anybody. Later I told Harris only through sheer necessity,
and because he had heard odd tales from old people which disposed him ever so little toward
belief. As I turned up the stinking black earth in front of the fireplace, my spade causing
a viscous yellow ichor to ooze from the white fungi which it severed, I trembled at the dubious
thoughts of what I might uncover. Some secrets of inner earth are not good for mankind, and
this seemed to me one of them.My hand shook perceptibly, but still I delved; after a while standing in the
large hole I had made. With the deepening of the hole, which was about six feet square, the
evil smell increased; and I lost all doubt of my imminent contact with the hellish thing whose
emanations had cursed the house for over a century and a half. I wondered what it would look
like—what its form and substance would be, and how big it might have waxed through long
ages of life-sucking. At length I climbed out of the hole and dispersed the heaped-up dirt,
then arranging the great carboys of acid around and near two sides, so that when necessary I
might empty them all down the aperture in quick succession. After that I dumped earth only along
the other two sides; working more slowly and donning my gas-mask as the smell grew. I was nearly
unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.Suddenly my spade struck something softer than earth. I shuddered, and made
a motion as if to climb out of the hole, which was now as deep as my neck. Then courage returned,
and I scraped away more dirt in the light of the electric torch I had provided. The surface
I uncovered was fishy and glassy—a kind of semi-putrid congealed jelly with suggestions
of translucency. I scraped further, and saw that it had form. There was a rift where a part
of the substance was folded over. The exposed area was huge and roughly cylindrical; like a
mammoth soft blue-white stovepipe doubled in two, its largest part some two feet in diameter.
Still more I scraped, and then abruptly I leaped out of the hole and away from the filthy thing;
frantically unstopping and tilting the heavy carboys, and precipitating their corrosive contents
one after another down that charnel gulf and upon the unthinkable abnormality whose titan
elbow I had seen.The blinding maelstrom of greenish-yellow vapour which surged tempestuously
up from that hole as the floods of acid descended, will never leave my memory. All along the
hill people tell of the yellow day, when virulent and horrible fumes arose from the factory
waste dumped in the Providence River, but I know how mistaken they are as to the source. They
tell, too, of the hideous roar which at the same time came from some disordered water-pipe or
gas main underground—but again I could correct them if I dared. It was unspeakably shocking,
and I do not see how I lived through it. I did faint after emptying the fourth carboy, which
I had to handle after the fumes had begun to penetrate my mask; but when I recovered I saw that
the hole was emitting no fresh vapours.The two remaining carboys I emptied down without particular result, and after
a time I felt it safe to shovel the earth back into the pit. It was twilight before I was done,
but fear had gone out of the place. The dampness was less foetid, and all the strange fungi
had withered to a kind of harmless greyish powder which blew ash-like along the floor. One of
earth’s nethermost terrors had perished forever; and if there be a hell, it had received
at last the daemon soul of an unhallowed thing. And as I patted down the last spadeful of mould,
I shed the first of the many tears with which I have paid unaffected tribute to my beloved uncle’s
memory.The next spring no more pale grass and strange weeds came up in the shunned
house’s terraced garden, and shortly afterward Carrington Harris rented the place. It
is still spectral, but its strangeness fascinates me, and I shall find mixed with my relief
a queer regret when it is torn down to make way for a tawdry shop or vulgar apartment building.
The barren old trees in the yard have begun to bear small, sweet apples, and last year the birds
nested in their gnarled boughs.